It's not the US that I'm personally most worried about, though we must do better internally. It's nations with vaccination rates that make even heavily anti-vaxxer regions of the US look good. Almost all of Africa is in incredibly bad shape. There are a couple of African countries that have broken 50%, but it is common to have rates below 10%. Its third largest country, The Democratic Republic of The Congo, has 100 million people and a 0.2% vaccination rate. The world must do better in helping Africa get vaccinated, both to stop variants and to end the erosion of Africa's hard won progress in recent years.
HamsterDeveloper@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
I have read it's likely South Africa has already seen a majority of the population infected at least once. A vaccine is to be preferred (prevention of death and long term consequences), but I think natural immunization in those countries will inevitably be faster than any vaccination programme could be carried out and it might be just as good in the picture of "ending" the pandemic.
pingveno@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
It's not just avoiding damage to individuals. Each new infected person means billions of new copies of the virus, each with a chance of mutating and causing a new variant. Until we see the end of a continent being left as a human petri dish, we're just going to be seeing more and more variants.
HamsterDeveloper@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
Do you think natural immunization is inferior to vaccines in terms of preventing future new variants? (not talking about variants that come into existence during the immunization process)
pingveno@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
No idea, but that's inconsequential. Immunization via infection just provides a chance for a new variant, and people can be infected multiple times. Immunization via vaccines does not have that risk.